Courtesy photoTintin pilots a motorcycle with his pal Captain Haddock and trusty pup, Snowy, on board.

So, who is this Tintin guy?

I’ve watched “The Adventures of Tintin,” and I still don’t know. The character is, like the Smurfs, originally a star of Belgian comics. He was created in the 1920s by a man named simply Herge, and has been franchised for other media in Europe for many decades.

Tintin has red hair swooped into a cowlick, a trusty pooch sidekick named Snowy, a gig as a journalist and a penchant for adventure. Research tells me his bland, youngish, boy scout personality is intentional, a blank slate for a variety of tales of action-packed intrigue. So it seems that Steven Spielberg’s motion-capture-animated cinematic take on the character — most Americans’ introduction to Tintin — remains true to this character aesthetic.

Modern audiences, however, are accustomed to protagonists with more depth and wit. “The Adventures of Tintin” has plenty of old-fashioned charm and visual wizardry, but it’s diverting at best. At worst, it feels like a cold and empty technical exercise, an excuse for Spielberg to show off. (Interesting side note: Tintin occasionally wields a pistol, which is terribly ironic, considering Spielberg, in a fit of political correctness, digitally removed the firearms from his 2002 re-release of “E.T.”)

The director is known for trading heavily in wonder, and you’ll find some of it embedded in the details here. The animation is remarkable, treading the line between photo-realism and the fantastical. Closeups reveal a humanity in the eyes of characters that Robert Zemeckis struggled to capture in the likes of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Polar Express.” It’s too bad we don’t connect with the characters as written. We’ve already established Tintin (voice of Jamie Bell) as a cypher, and his eventual adventuring partner here, Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), is an irritating boozehound.

The plot, needlessly complicated, finds Tintin chasing a riddle and meeting up with Haddock, who unfortunately becomes the crux of the narrative. They end up on the high seas searching for a sunken ship and some scrolls tied to Haddock’s familial ancestry. There are generic bad guys (one voiced by Daniel Craig); there’s a pair of bumbling comic-relief pushbroom-mustached cops, voiced by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who steal a scene or two; the dog often saves Tintin’s hide, and seems smarter than everyone.

Frankly, I stopped caring after the 12th (or so) convolution.

Initially, Spielberg keeps us involved by stepping on the gas and maintaining a propulsive pace as Tintin and Haddock traverse the world by motorcycle, aeroplane and ship, surviving scrapes and punching goons in the mouth. The camera is always panning and scanning and swirling and tracking, Spielberg indulging in the anything-goes freedom of animation, not beholden to the limitations of physical reality.

After a while, though, the spectacle of filmmaking on display becomes dull and numbing without an emotional foothold. Perhaps those of us not privy to the pop-cultural history of Tintin are missing a piece of the puzzle, but it’s a head scratcher that so many big names — Spielberg, Peter Jackson is a producer, Edgar Wright (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) punched up the script — could come up with something so thin and forgettable.